My whole life I’ve known that my grandmother came to this country in 1920 with her parents. She was 8 years old. None of them spoke a word of English. I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to come into that unknown, unfamiliar land, and start brand new. What I’ve never considered, before tonight, is the unbearableness of what they had to have behind. How bad must life have been, for them to have packed up and come across an entire ocean, to an unknown world just for the possibility of finding something better, something safer, something perhaps, a bit less hateful? For the first time in my life, I have an inkling. I know what it feels like to be living in a homeland so unempathetic that I feel (and I fear) that the only conceivable option is to leave it behind.